Original oil painting by: Grandfather’s wife
Grandfather says he thinks you might be interested in the story of Dan Blakeslee and Ralph William Blakeslee.
Well, Grandfather’s going to tell it to you anyway.
Dan Blakeslee made his way up the Chilkoot Trail into the Yukon in 1899, built a boat on the shore of Lake Labarge as so many other stampeders did, then set off down the Yukon River toward the Klondike and the gold fields.
He lost most of his provisions when his boat approached the Five Finger Rapids on the wrong side of the river and he had to cut the raft he was towing loose in order to muscle his boat through the only passage between the fingers. He tells of the men who didn’t make it, clinging to the rocks.
He was one tough bird: Survived, came back to Pennsylvania with enough gold to buy a farm near Corry, married Bessie Crowell and raised children, among them Ralph William Blakeslee, Grandfather’s father. Ralph nearly died during the 1918 flu epidemic when he was a teenager and he was in delicate health ever after.
Later he was obsessed with preaching the gospel and rented a room in a public elementary school in Detroit in the 1930s for his Sunday school. Imagine teaching the gospel in a public school building these days; we’re too enlightened.
Ralph’s car was a 1936 Chevrolet, which eventually trickled down to Grandfather. It had an auxiliary crank for starting, and a good thing too. It was the middle of the Great Depression and Ralph didn’t have the money to replace the battery, so he cranked the car to life.
Grandfather remembers Ralph pulling into gas stations and asking to buy “a goblet” of gas. He got enough gas for a dime or so to get us to Sunday school and back, thanks to the grace of God and sympathetic gas station attendants.
The end.
The Chevrolet early on. Pedal cars carrying “Grandfather” and his sister were gifts from Gam’pa Dan
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About the Author: RD Blakeslee is an octogenarian from West Virginia who built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.
Photos: Courtesy of the Blakeslee Family
Picture; Demise of the Chevrolet: https://lenpenzo.com/blog/id44248-grandfather-says-the-correct-way-to-cope-with-adversity.html
Loved this one, RD. It easily explains how you became you. : )
P.S. Feel free to grab my email address if you’d like to correspond further.
Well, Gee, at 88 years old as of the 21st of this month, and that easily explains why I’ll probably be not me anymore, in another twenty years or so …
Thanks for the invite. I’ll get your email address from Len.
Grandfather, whether you are still being you in twenty years or not, twenty years from now I, and likely many others, will still be better people for having read your musings.
Thanks for the insights, the thoughts, and the humor.
Thank you, Jason. I appreciate your generous responses and am glad you find the series worthwhile.
Always enjoy your writings, Mr. Blakeslee. Just curious. Do you know how much gold it took to buy that farm near Corry?
I have my grandfathers 1899 assay statement from the Dominion of Canada in the amount of $1,806.24, for109.21 ozs. of gold. At today’s fiat dollar price, that would be about $142,000.
But I don’t know how much of that went to buy the farm.
A did a DuckDucGo (I don’t use Google), trying to find statistics re price of farmland a hundred years ago. Nothing. But, there is alot about expenditures for other stuff.
I guess it’s typical of the interests of folks today – my own story is an example. Most moderns are not all that interested in rural life.
Dave and William: I wrote an article highlighting the value of wages, products and commodities in terms of gold and silver last year. An acre of Kansas farmland could be had for $20 US dollars in 1900. Keep in mind that the $20 gold double eagle coins that were in circulation at the time contained 0.9675 troy ounces of the yellow metal. More here: https://lenpenzo.com/blog/id47735-historical-gold-and-silver-benchmarks-for-job-wages-and-commodity-prices.html
Thanks, Len
Pennsylvania had been settled longer than Kansas and would probably have had higher land prices. Assuming 30/acre, my grandfather’s gold would have bought 4,733 acres – at least ten times the actual acreage of his farm in Corry.
His brother Will owned a seat on the NY Stock exchange and was a multi-millionaire. Will also invested my Grandfather’s money. In those days, an investment was a company’s capital, used to produce something, not simply speculation on a rising share price produced by Federal Reserve fiat money-pumping, as it is today.
Between the two of them, they had plenty of money and my grandfather retired even earlier than I did. I was 44.
Apropos of Gee’s linking my persona to my Grandfather’s: My grandfather built his own house.
Our public schools routinely rent out space for religious activities on the weekends. Many church plants start that way. However, there is no structured religion within the curriculum of the public schools.
That seems to me to be a good policy – I wonder how many of the government school systems follow it?
There is quite a lot of evidence that home-schooled children generally get a good primary education, but they are sometimes faulted as lacking socialization.
Our church buildings stand empty all week. Perhaps they could be used for local home schooled children’s social gatherings .
Len has kindly posted an earlier photo of the Chevrolet and “Grandfather”.